Dr Zainab Samad
Chair, Department of Medicine & Founding Director, CITRIC-Health Data Science Centre
Dr Zainab Samad, a proud alumnus of the Medical College’s MBBS programme, is the Principal Investigator of the grant and the Founding Director of the newly established Health Data Science Centre. She has served as full-time faculty at Duke University where she worked with renowned clinical researchers and a large multi-disciplinary team to leverage local data to inform long-term outcomes of valvular heart disease. Dr Samad returned to Pakistan and has since been passionately pursuing a university-wide initiative to combine and make use of the University’s health data to estimate disease patterns and outcomes in the country.
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Dr Zahra Hoodhboy
Assistant Professor, Paediatrics & Child Health
Dr Zahra Hoodbhoy is an alumnus of the AKU Medical College's MBBS programme and a final year doctoral student in Public Health. Her research interest lies in technology and artificial intelligence in improving maternal and child health indicators in low-resource settings. As part of the data science initiative, Dr Hoodbhoy and her team are leading the capacity-building arm that aims to develop a health data science program in Pakistan. She will also work with the larger team to collate data from internal and external sources for enabling data-driven solutions for health issues unique to Pakistan and other LMIC contexts.
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Ms Mushyada Ali
Manager, Medicine
Ms Mushyada Ali has over 14 years of experience in Information Technology with a background in business intelligence, business process reengineering, and software development. She completed her Bachelors in Engineering in Computer and Information Systems and is currently pursuing a Masters in Data Science from the Institute of Business Administration (IBA).
As part of the project team, Ms Mushyada is supporting the collation of the internal data landscape. She is also looking at the data sets available in the university to understand and broaden the use of available data in the organization.
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Dr M Imran Nisar
Assistant Professor, Paediatrics & Child Health
Dr Nisar completed his MBBS from Karachi University in 2005 and MSc in Epidemiology & Biostatistics from the Aga Khan University in 2011 and is currently completing his Ph.D. in population and public health from AKU. His area of work includes infectious diseases, maternal, newborn & child health, vaccine-preventable diseases, early childhood growth, development, and nutrition. He has various publications on Global Burden of Disease (GBD) estimation with the Institute for Health Metric and Evaluation (IHME), Seattle, USA. Dr Imran Nisar has co-led multiple surveys for COVID-19 in the district east of Karachi during the pandemic year and is a principal investigator for a recently completed Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded study exploring transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 in Karachi. | .jpg)
Ms Sana MahmoodDirector, Strategy & Advancement Ms Sana is Director, Strategy, Medical College and Lecturer, Department of Community Health Sciences at the Aga Khan University (AKU). Sana has a deep interest in systems-level strategic planning and has worked across AKU's education and health portfolios to develop roadmaps to advance priorities within the context of Pakistan's landscape. Sana holds an Ed.M. in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a B.A. Honors and B.Ed from Queen's University in Canada.
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Dr Aamir Abbas
Project Manager, CITRIC-Health Data Science Centre
Dr Aamir Abbas is a medical doctor, epidemiologist, and data scientist. He completed his MBBS from Khyber Medical University, Peshawar, Pakistan. Immediately after completing his house job Dr Abbas did a Master's in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan. Dr Abbas is a Fulbright Scholar and as part of this scholarship, he completed his second Masters in Health Care Analytics and Information Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Dr Abbas has more than 15 publications to his credit.
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Dr Hasan Nawaz Tahir
Senior Instructor, Community Health Sciences
Dr Hasan Nawaz Tahir is a public health professional with expertise in digital health. He has graduated from Baqai Medical University with MBBS degree following which he completed his residency (FCPS) in Community medicine (public health) from Aga Khan University. He has been involved in grant writing for digital health and data science interventions in the context of LMIC's, the development of digital health solutions ranging from geo-spatial mapping, electronic disease surveillance system, hospital digitization, monitoring, and evaluation of digital health interventions.
As part of the data science initiative, Dr. Hasan is involved in the development of the curriculum for the MS in Health Data Science. He also conducted a feasibility survey to assess the need for the MS programme.
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Ms Salma Tajuddin
Senior Instructor, Medicine Salma Tajuddin is a data scientist, working as research faculty in the department of medicine. She holds a master's in computing from SZABIST. She has completed a range of Ph.D. courses from IBA including deep learning, stochastic modeling, and probabilistic reasoning. She has been associated with IBA's Artificial Intelligence Lab. She has worked on medical datasets at Aga Khan University Hospital, using natural language processing and spatiotemporal analysis. She has also worked with clustering algorithms, predictive modeling, image processing, and network analysis. Ms Salma has worked in the industry on projects for various international companies and has taught computing and analytics courses at IBA, AKUH, and SZABIST.
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Dr Bilal Ahmed UsmaniAssistant Professor & Section Head Epidemiology & Biostatistics, CHS Dr Bilal Ahmed Usmani is a mathematical modeler with an emphasis on infectious diseases epidemiology. Inspired by patterns and periodic phenomena in nature, he has gained rich experience in applications of modeling techniques on the analysis of big data, especially data pertaining to rare events. Dr Bilal has been a part of multiple curriculum design and research committees in government institutions and will play a substantial role in the research and capacity building of the data science professionals from the initiative.
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Ms Salima Karani
Assistant Manager, Medicine
Ms Karani has been associated with the institution for the last ten years and with the department since the year 2019. Being a graduate of the School of Nursing and Midwifery, AKU, and the University of Nottingham, UK, she has served in diverse healthcare domains, including critical care nursing and management, quality improvement in healthcare, and administration. In the current role, she is serving as the Health Data Science's Initiative administrator that involves research administration, hiring, communication, record maintenance, and overall execution of the project.
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Dr Kausar Parveen
Senior Research Coordinator, CITRIC-Health Data Science Centre Dr Kausar Perveen's interest in the field of data analytics for healthcare was instituted when she was working as a Fullstack developer for a social media website for collecting family health history and predicting the risk of cancer. She believes Data Science provides an elegant solution to most problems in the healthcare industry and is committed to working on those solutions. Her interest lies in Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Natural Language Processing.
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Dr Ibrahim Munaf
Research Associate, CITRIC-Health Data Science Centre Dr Ibrahim completed his MBBS from The Aga Khan University in 2021 and is currently supporting the project as a Research Associate. Dr Ibrahim is optimistic that the insights we glean from this first-ever Health Data Science Initiative shall go a long way in enabling
quality care and targeted interventions.
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